Across my work I ask how war and the military logics that underpin its possibility and conduct are reproduced, constitute and are contested in and through individuals and the everyday, and how this entails gendered power relations.
My most recent and ongoing research shares a common starting point: the differing ways that war exists to different people; the ways in which we encounter, view, and ‘live’ war, what this variously makes visible, less or invisible, and what the political implications of this are. For example in a recent article published in International Political Sociology I trace why it matters politically that Chelsea Manning is commonly referred to as a whistle blower and not a soldier. I argue that this obscures her encounters with war which were, through her job as a data analyst, characterised by boredom and bureaucracy (a view of war which sits uncomfortably with and is potentially subversive of the militarist narratives that glorify it).
My current project focuses on the war experiences of soldiers in support roles in the UK army. Such soldiers make up the majority of those in the theatre of war but are largely obscured within wider society and scholarship, which often conflates ‘the military’ with the minority who comprise close-combat elements.
